AWS WordPress Hosting: Full Tutorial and Best Options

Both are viable options – the approach that you take will really just depend on your needs, knowledge level, and budget.

👉 In this guide, we’re going to cover 🔎 both methods so that you have all the information you need about how to host WordPress on AWS.

First, we’ll show you how to self-host WordPress on AWS using two different methods:

1. Creating your server directly via the AWS console using Lightsail (though you can also use EC2).
2. Using a server control panel to simplify the process of creating and maintaining your AWS server, while still maintaining full ownership.

How to host WordPress on AWS: two of the top options

In this first section, we’ll go over hosting a WordPress site on AWS using two approaches:

1. Using one of the pre-built WordPress blueprints in the AWS console.
2. Using a cloud-based server control panel. These panels give you a cloud dashboard to create and manage your server and websites. They also handle configuring and maintaining the basic server software. However, you still have full ownership and control over your server.

AWS WordPress hosting cost and price

Before we get to the tutorials, let’s talk about the AWS WordPress hosting 💵 cost.

The AWS WordPress hosting price will depend on which AWS virtual server product you want to use for your site.

There are two different compute products that you can use for WordPress:

• Amazon Lightsail
• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Lightsail

In general, Lightsail is a simpler, more affordable option that works more like a traditional VPS. However, it doesn’t have as many advanced features. For example, Lightsail doesn’t offer automatic scaling or elastic volumes.

Still, Lightsail should work fine for most low to medium traffic WordPress sites. Also, Amazon generally recommends using Lightsail over EC2 for WordPress hosting.

If you use Lightsail, you can benefit from easy-to-understand flat pricing, starting at just $5.00 per month.

You can also try it out with three months free, which is great if you want to host WordPress on the AWS free tier.

EC2

Amazon EC2 can be a good option for more high-powered WordPress sites that need to handle high workloads, along with needing access to advanced features like scalability and customization.

It’s a little more complex than Lightsail, but it gives you more flexibility and power in configuring your hosting environment.

With EC2, you’ll pay per hour or second based on the resources that your account consumes.

For the cheapest instance that can support a WordPress site, you could pay as little as ~$6-10 per month. For example, the t3.micro instance.

ℹ️ However, you’ll want to use the calculator to better understand your costs.

With EC2, there’s also a free tier that gives you 12 months of free usage of the t3.micro instances. These instances only have 2 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, but they can work for very small WordPress sites, which gives you another option to host WordPress on the AWS free tier.

How to host a WordPress site on AWS using Lightsail

For this tutorial, we’re going to use Amazon Lightsail to create a WordPress site, as it’s the simplest way to set up AWS WordPress hosting.

If you’re using EC2, it will be a little more complex, but the basic idea will be the same, as EC2 also has pre-made WordPress configurations.

1. Create a new Lightsail instance

To get started, log into your AWS management console (or register for an account if you haven’t done so already).

Once you’re in the AWS console, open the Lightsail service. You can also click here to go straight to Lightsail.

Then, click the Create instance button to create a new Lightsail instance, which is the hosting that will power your WordPress site.

2. Select WordPress blueprint

On the next screen, you should be able to select the WordPress blueprint, which will preinstall WordPress for you, along with all of the underlying technologies needed to power WordPress.

If you don’t see the WordPress blueprint, make sure that you’ve chosen Linux/Unix as the platform – AWS doesn’t currently offer a WordPress blueprint for Windows server.

You’ll also want to make sure your Instance location is in the right spot. You want to choose an instance location that’s as close as possible to your target market.

3. Choose instance plan

Further down the page, you can choose the resources that you want to use for your instance.

For live WordPress sites, I recommend a bare minimum of 1 GB RAM and 2 vCPU, which is the $7 per month instance. If you have simple sites and cache everything, you can handle hundreds of thousands of visitors per month with just this plan.

It’s also part of the AWS free tier, which means you’ll get your first three months free.

For more complex, dynamic sites, you’ll probably want to choose a plan with more RAM and vCPUs. You can always start with the $7 per month plan and upgrade later on.

4. Finalize your instance

Once you’ve verified that all of the settings are correct, give your instance a name and then click the Create instance button at the bottom of the interface:

You’ll now have a short wait while AWS creates and provisions your Lightsail instance:

It should only take a minute or so. Once it’s done, you’ll see it change to “running.”

5. Access your WordPress site

At this point, you have a working WordPress site.

To access it, click on the name of your Lightsail instance to open its dashboard:

Then, look for the Public IP:

If you paste this IP address into your browser address bar and hit enter, you should see your WordPress site. Don’t worry, in the next step, you’ll learn how to connect your domain name.

By default, your WordPress username is “user.” However, to find your password, you’ll need to use SSH.

Go back to the dashboard for your instance and click the Connect using SSH button under Use your browser. This will open an in-browser terminal window.

Then, enter the following command and hit enter:

cat bitnami_application_password

You should then see your WordPress password, which you can use to log in to the WordPress dashboard:

You can now log in to WordPress:

• Username: user
• Password: from the SSH window

6. Connect your domain name

To finish things out, all you need to do is connect your domain name to your AWS WordPress install.

If you don’t have a domain name yet, we have a guide on how to buy a domain name.

First, you’ll want to create a static IP for your instance (which doesn’t cost anything extra). Otherwise, the IP will change every time you restart the instance.

Go to the Networking tab and click Create static IP:

On the next screen, give it a name and click Create:

Now, you should see a new static IP, which is where you can always access your site.

To connect your custom domain name, you need to go to wherever you’re managing your domain’s DNS records (typically your domain registrar) and add an A record that points to your static IP for both the www and non-www version of your domain name.

For example, if you manage your domain name at Cloudflare, your A records might look like this:

Alternatively, you can also create a DNS zone which would let you point your domain name to the AWS nameservers and manage DNS records from Lightsail. 👉 Here’s an article on how to do that.

Once you connect your domain name, you might need to update your WordPress site URLs to that domain. To do that, choose Settings → General in your WordPress dashboard.

And that’s it! 🤩 You now have a working WordPress website on AWS Lightsail.

How to host a WordPress website on AWS using RunCloud

While the AWS WordPress blueprint makes it very easy to get up and running with a WordPress site, maintaining your bare metal AWS server will be a little more complex.

There’s no web-based dashboard to manage software and configure your server, so you would need to do everything via the command-line.

For that reason, I think that most people would be better off using a server control panel, which is my personal approach to hosting WordPress on cloud providers like AWS.

Not only do these tools make it easy to manage your server, but they’ll also typically take care of basic software and security updates so that you can just focus on running your sites. Beyond that, they can help you implement caching systems, work with staging sites, and so on.

Cloud-based server control panels are convenient because they let you manage all of your servers via the cloud. Here are the popular options:

1. RunCloud
2. GridPane
3. SpinupWP

Alternatively, you can also use more traditional options like cPanel, Plesk, or CyberPanel.

👉 Here’s a quick example of how this would work with RunCloud…

1. Provision a new server

To get started, you need to provision a new AWS server instance. RunCloud lets you create a Lightsail instance directly from the RunCloud dashboard. For EC2, you’d need to create your instance via AWS and then connect it to RunCloud:

On the next steps, you’ll get some extra options, such as choosing your instance resources.

2. Install WordPress

Once RunCloud provisions your web server, you can create a new WordPress install using a simple interface:

And that’s pretty much it! You can now manage your site from a simple dashboard, which also lets you control firewalls, server-level caching, and more.

All you need to do is connect your domain name and you’re ready to go:

Again, I think this approach is both simpler and more powerful 💪 for most people.

The best AWS WordPress hosting providers available

If you want to benefit from AWS infrastructure, but you don’t want to deal with hosting a WordPress site on AWS yourself, you can choose a WordPress hosting provider that uses AWS infrastructure.

With these hosts, you won’t own the AWS infrastructure directly. That is, you won’t manage your servers from the AWS console. However, your sites still will be using AWS infrastructure.

Here are some of the top 💹 options:

• Cloudways
• Nestify
• Pagely
• WP Engine

Cloudways

Cloudways uses a similar approach to the RunCloud server control panel that we showcased above. However, the key difference is that Cloudways is a bundled, all-in-one service, so you don’t directly control the underlying AWS instance like you would with RunCloud.

You can spin up one or more servers using Amazon EC2. Then, you can easily manage those servers and install WordPress from a user-friendly cloud control panel.

Overall, if you don’t want to go the self-hosting route, I think this is one of the best options for AWS WordPress hosting.

Cloudways AWS hosting plans start at $20.56 per month for the AWS Micro option, which includes both the Cloudways fee and the AWS hosting charges.

Nestify

Nestify is a managed WordPress hosting provider that exclusively uses AWS. However, Nestify still has very affordable plans, which is unique, as many other AWS-based providers can be a bit pricey.

In fact, Nestify is one of the cheapest ways to access AWS WordPress hosting, with plans starting at just $19 per month for:

• Unlimited sites and visitors.
• 40 GB storage.
• 2 dedicated CPU.
• 4 GB RAM.

For more heavy-duty uses, Nestify has also pricier plans that offer AWS autoscaling, decoupled MySQL, and more.

Basically, there’s value for everybody, no matter what your budget is.

Pagely

Pagely is a premium managed WordPress host that uses AWS infrastructure for all of its plans.

While Pagely isn’t cheap, they’re doing a lot more than just throwing up a WordPress install on an EC2 instance. Rather, they’ve built an entire tech stack that makes use of the broader AWS ecosystem to build in features to help you create faster, more scalable, and more secure sites.

Pagely’s cheapest plan costs $199 per month (though sometimes it’s on sale for as low as $99 per month).

WP Engine (custom plans only)

WP Engine is a popular managed WordPress host that offers AWS-powered WordPress hosting plans.

However, only WP Engine’s custom plans use AWS infrastructure.

While WP Engine’s standard pre-set plans are also quality hosting options, those plans use Google Cloud and not AWS.

If you want to learn more about WP Engine’s AWS WordPress hosting plans, you can go to this page and chat with WP Engine’s sales staff.

👉 You can also learn more in our WP Engine vs Pagely comparison.

Get started with AWS WordPress hosting today! 🚀

When it comes to AWS WordPress hosting, you have several options.

First, you can go directly to AWS to set up your WordPress site. The simplest approach here is to use Amazon Lightsail and its pre-configured WordPress blueprints. Alternatively, you can also use Amazon EC2, which can be a better option for more heavy-duty use cases.

If you want to simplify setup and management while still maintaining full control over your AWS resources, you can consider a server control panel solution such as RunCloud, GridPane, or SpinupWP.

Finally, for the simplest option to benefit from AWS infrastructure, you can choose a WordPress host that uses AWS, such as Cloudways, Nestify, or others. While you won’t have full ownership over the actual AWS resources, your sites will still get the performance benefits of using AWS.

💡 To learn more about how AWS compares with other cloud platforms, you can read our comparisons of Google Cloud vs AWS and Azure vs AWS.

🖼️ For another way to integrate WordPress with AWS, you can also read our guide on how to offload WordPress media to Amazon S3.

Do you still have any questions about hosting WordPress on AWS? Let us know in the comments!